Winning With Wealth Blog

Finishing 1st In The Rat Race

Posted by T Money on March 21, 2016

Get Control of Your Money!

Gaining control of your money requires telling your money what to do instead of letting your money do whatever it wants. There are a countless number of businesses, banks, retailers, people, family members, criminals, etc. that are willing to take care of your money if you don't have a plan for it. In order to gain control of your money you will have to learn how to create, follow, and live by a budget

When you plan on driving to a new store, restaurant, friend or co-workers house, do you leave the house with no clue on where you are going? Of course not, we get the address and quickly enter it into our favorite mapping service and get directions. Why not have a plan or directions for your money?

What Average Do You Belong?

When I started on my wealth journey I spent a lot of time reading on how people became wealthy. During my search I found the wealthy plan out what their money is going to do for them and where that money is going to go and knew why it was going there. In many cases planned out weekly, monthly, and yearly. In Thomas J Stanley's book The Millionaire Next Door he found that millionaires spend over 8 hours per month on there personal finances. Compare this to the amount of time that people spend glued to social media. According to Global Web Index the average person spends 1.7 hours per day on social media sites. What is more important to you? Wealth in retirement or the millions of selfies and cat pictures that add zero value to your life?

Start you budget and get control of your money now! It doesn't take long, and it isn't as painful as it seems. It doesn't require you to live on rice and beans. It doesn't require you to sacrifice to the point you hate life. It does require you to take action for your money and take control of your money and in turn take control of your life.

Tell your money what to do, Get a Budget!

“If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.” - Yogi Berra

Budgets are frustrating to make and take persistent effort to stick with. Everyone that has an income and bills attempts to keep a budget, budgets are a necessity. Either you keep a budget in your head, written down, in a spreadsheet, or an App. If you are keeping your budget in your head how successful are you at sticking to your budget? If you were like me it was an epic failure and you continuously over spend and under earned each month. This failure didn't appear at first but after years the debt piled up and the problem became apparent. Sound familiar? I denied my failure too. For years.

Budgeting in your head doesn't work. Thankfully technology has advanced and Real-Time budgeting and tracking of our budget is possible. Apps like Mint, Every Dollar, and You Need A Budget you can build your budget every month and track where you are every day, hour, minute, second... You get the idea.

Start Your Budget Now!

Where to Start with your budget? Pull out a sheet of paper and lets begin. The best place to start with you budget is to start with your Income. On the top of the paper write down "My Budget" and below that write down you monthly take home income(after taxes & withholding). Put a line under the income and we will start our budget categories.

Budget Categories

The main categories for the budget will consists of life's necessities, your needs to produce income, debts, and lastly wants. It is important to start your budget with the basic needs of life. Number one is to have a roof over your head and the utilities to keep warm or cool if you are in the south. Have electricity to keep the lights on and running water to cook and stay clean. Along with the shelter you will need food to keep up your energy and insurance to keep you out of financial disaster. Take it from
me, getting into a position where you need insurance and don't have it will devastate you financially. After your basic needs are taken care of you will want to ensure that you allocate the appropriate amount to your needs to produce an income. Transportation, clothing, and grooming all fall under this set of needs and should be maintained to support your income. After ensuring you protect your income you need to pay your personal debts. Before you can play you have to full fill your obligation to the people you owe money to. You borrowed the money, you must now pay it back, and pay it back FAST! The faster the better. The more you can put towards paying back your bad debt the faster you can start building wealth and living the live that you truly deserve. Last but not least you can use the rest of your budget for your wants.
Life's Necessities

  • Saving(cash is key to building wealth)
  • Shelter(rent and mortgage)
  • Utilities(heat, water, gas, electricity)
  • Food(groceries, lunch at work, snacks)
  • Insurance(medical, auto, life, renters, home, etc)

Needs to Produce Income

  • Transportation(lease, auto loan, gas, maintenance, inspection/registration, etc.)
  • Clothing(dry cleaning, replacement clothes, etc.)
  • Grooming(hair, nails, shaving, etc.)

Debts

  • Credit Cards
  • Student Loans
  • Personal Loans

Wants

  • Personal Spending
  • Recreation & Entertainment
  • Toys

Simple Budget Calulator

Try the budget calculator at SmartAsset.com

Simple Budget Worksheet

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Posted by T Money on March 15, 2016

Welcome to Wealth For The Win!

My Story | It Isn't Pretty....

Howdy!

I'm Thomas. Welcome to Wealth For The Win.Me I'm glad you have taken the time to visit and hopefully you will learn a few things with me to help you get out of the rat race and on your way to winning with wealth.

 

I am the creator of this blog and I'm glad you could join me.

 

I'm a Petroleum Engineer by trade, but my business is in building wealth for myself and educate as many people as possible along the way.

 

Finance is a fascinating topic to me. I have dealt with the good, the bad, and the ugly.

 

I have been debt free, in crippling debt, and somewhere in the middle in different points of my life and I have battled through each point and have learned a lot along the way.

 

I'm going to fast forward to when I lost track of my finances and Murphy decided to visit me while
when I was in college. My senior year of college I was well on my way to earning my degree with limited amount of debt ($4300 in student loans) Wrecked Truckand had just finished interviewing for my new career with a number of companies.  I was 28 and invincible with low debt, a good amount of savings, a well funded 401k from a previous job and no health insurance. On September 29th early in the morning I was headed to pick up a friend to travel to an annual technical conference out of town when everything fell apart. I wrecked my truck into a tree on a one lane country road miles from town.

 

After I gained consciousness from the impact I realized that i was trapped. The force of the impact had pinned me in my truck. The airbag and seat belt did their job Hospitaland saved my life but also left their mark on me. The airbag burnt my arm, busted my nose, punched my teeth through my lower lip and saved my life. The seat belt bruised my abdomen and fractured my collar bone while at the same time trapping me in my truck and also saved my life. The truck crumpled as it was designed to do and dissipated the force of the impact as well as it could around me and not directly into me. I was trapped in my truck coughing from the white powder of the air bags but I was alive. I had only one option in this situation and it was to get out of this truck and get help. After fighting with the seat belt, breaking out the remainder of my driver side window, and punching the dash board enough to get it off of me so that I could exit my demolished truck I began to realize that i was in much worse shape than I had initially thought.

 

Prior to running off the road and hitting the tree I had started to hydroplane. In my infinite wisdom I applied my foot to the break and made the problem worse by locking up the tires and ensuring I would have the head on collision with the tree. The impact caused the brake pedal to break my leg. I realized that I had a broken leg when i finally pulled myself through the window of my truck and could see that my foot was facing the wrong direction and what should normally be on the inside of my leg was now on the outside. Just search compound fracture of a tibia and you will get an idea of what it looked like.

 

After freeing myself, falling on my back to the ground in the ditch, I proceeded to tourniquet my leg above and below my knee. I wrapped the remainder of my shirt around my foot and leg. I proceeded down the road to the nearest house where I finally received help.

 

This moment in my life left me injured, and scared, and feeling helpless. In this state i proceeded to make a large numbGraduate1er of mistakes. I took out 30,000 dollars in student loans to help pay part of the medical bills. I used credit cards to fill the rest of the gap once i reached the max of my credit cards and i was still 170,000 dollars short of paying for the hospital stay, emergency surgery, and the other costs associated with healing an open wound. I was drowning in debt at this point.
I was lucky to live, and even luckier to have the friends and family I do to support me through the healing process and helped me get through my last year of school and graduate on time. There is no amount of thank that can possibly amount for the gratitude I have for them.

 

Now that Murphy had moved in and ransacked my financial house it was time to evict him. That brings me to where I am today. I have worked extremely hard over the last 2-1/2 years to clear the debt disaster I created by failing to have insurance. It is a hard lesson to learn.

 

The goal of this website is to take what I have learned from my experience and help as many people as possible to get out of financial trouble and on the path to financial freedom and help each and every person win with wealth.

 

We all have obstacles in our lives and we will all have something that seems impossible to overcome. The key is to take action and take the steps towards overcoming these set backs. There are very few things that can keep anyone from succeeding. Most of the things holding us back are excuses and aren't holding us back. We are holding ourselves back. Like in life, our financial lives are held back by only one thing, ourselves. Small Logo

 

Its time to take action, its time to kick Murphy out and lose the excuses. Its time to take responsibility for our money and show it who is running the show instead of our money controlling us.

 

Please join me here at Wealth For The Win to take control of our financial situation. Lets take action and stop running the rat race. Lets break away from the normal and become Winners. Its time to stop being losers with money and its time to create Wealth For The Win!

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